Urban Survival Guide

SURVIVAL REPORT

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What does urban survival mean?

There are plenty of survival

guides out there and most of

them about surviving miles

away from home. But what

about the everyday, the

mundane, situations where you

constantly find yourself saying:

if only I had that, if only I knew that?

Although it's always the same thing, you've never got the right tool

or the right information handy. Well, thats what an urban survival

guide is good for. Helping you survive right where you are.

Even though, experts say: when in danger, you have to leave, we

have to admit that packing up and getting out may not be a solution

for everyone.

Why?

1. Family members who are unable or unwilling to move due to age,

sickness, physical shortcomings, finances, denial, or baseless Hope.

It could easily be a no-brainer for you to choose the high risk

situation of staying with them rather than the fear abandoning them

to an unknown fate.

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2. You may not be able to find a job that youre trained for in a rural

area, or you might just be in a financial pickle where you cant afford

to leave.

3. If you or a member of your family are undergoing long term

medical treatments and need to be close to a particular hospital for

insurance purposes.

4. You might have a retreat to go to, but miss the window of

opportunity to leave town and now the roads are choked with out-

of-gas cars.

5. One of your immediate family members could be traveling on

business.

6. You or your spouse might be a public servant (police, fire, EMS,

military, or utility) and you agreed to stay and help.

7. You dont have anywhere outside of the city to go.

8. The disaster is a deadly virus (flu) outbreak and you can just

ride it out safely at home.

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9. You experience a natural disaster like an earthquake, volcano,

mudslide, or tsunami.

These are all possible situations that you need to consider and trust

me, if you have everything you need, youll be fine wherever you are.

But what dangers are we talking here?

List of potential threats

1. Crimes

First of all, you need to be aware of the criminal rate in your area.

Dont be afraid. This is only a precaution measure and something

that everyone should do.

You can view all of the crimes that your local law enforcement is

reporting by going to one of these two sites:

http://www.crimereports.com

If your city does not share data with crimereports.com, try:

http://www.spotcrime.com

On crimereports.com, click on the Crime Types button and select

violent crimes. Then, pick the 30 day option. This will show you all

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of the violent crimes committed in your area in the last 30 days, as

reported by your local law enforcement.

In the upper right hand corner of the map, it will tell you how many

crimes are being shown. Crimereports.com will show a maximum of

500 crimes on a given map, so make sure you zoom in so that this

number is under 500.

The addresses that have a teal blue box are addresses where

multiple incidents have happened in the last 30 days. If there are

areas with multiple teal blue boxes, consider marking them on your

map.

2. Accidents/Natural Disasters/Terrorist attacks

Take a look at your map or

http://www.nationalatlas.g

ov/natlas/Natlasstart.asp if

you dont have your map

handy and locate the

railroad tracks in your area.

If you are within a mile of

the tracks, you need to have a plan in place for rail accidents.

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No need to worry. There are only 5-10 rail crashes a year in the US

and the Graniteville crash is the WORST one since 2005! Most

deaths in rail accidents happen because of the actual crash and not

because of chemicals released into the air.

In addition to accidents, Arabic terrorist websites have been

promoting the use of homemade thermite to cut rail lines or weld

debris to rail lines in urban areas to derail trains suspected of or

known to be carrying hazardous cargo. These sites are also

promoting attacks on industrial chemical storage facilities. In

particular, theyre targeting anhydrous ammonia (fertilizer),

hydrogen fluoride (pharmacology, plastics, refineries), methyl

isocyanate (pesticides, adhesives, rubbers), and chlorine.

So, if you live/work near a rail line, you should know that a

crash/toxic leak is a possibility and decide what your response

would be if a large scale chemical release happens. It isnt likely to

happen, but if it does, you may be the only person who can act

immediately and guide others around you.

Fortunately, your preparations for this scenario will also carry over

to the more mundane (and likely) threat of an industrial fire upwind

of your location. As an example, if you hear a massive train crash

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mile upwind from you during a normal time and immediately see a

cloud rising up into the air, you might want to take action by getting

out of the area.

There was no explosion and you can figure that if the wind is

blowing straight towards you with a light breeze (10 mph), you

probably have 3 minutes before any of the smoke/chemicals reach

you and the best course of action is to leave in your car and tell your

co-workers/neighbors to do the same.

Lets say that you are directly north of the explosion. If possible, you

want to put distance between you and the incident while traveling

perpendicular to the direction of the wind.

Keep in mind that your response will most likely be different if a

large scale chemical release happens during normal times than if it

happens during a local/regional emergency if normal travel isnt an

option.

If such an event happens during a time of general emergency, or if

you arent one of the first to evacuate, you may have to Survive

where you are.

You should also consider developing a similar plan if you live within

a mile of a chemical manufacturing company, refinery, fuel storage

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facility, or manufacturing facility that has large stockpiles of

chemicals.

Start making note of these facilities as youre driving around and

dont be afraid to ask firemen if there are any facilities near your

house that you should be aware of.

3. Crowds

Avoid large groups of people in case of emergency. In particular:

1. Stadiums

2. Homeless Shelters

3. Schools

4. Auditoriums

5. Any area designated as a Red Cross Shelter

6. Hospitals

7. Churches

Why? Well, its where panicked people trying to get in will be. Its

where people looking for handouts/victims will be hunting for their

next mark. Its also where people who got kicked out of the facility

for fighting/drugs/etc. will be congregating, and drug dealers will be

peddling to refugees from the shelters.

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Your area may be different. In many parts of the Midwest & the

Rockies, church members wouldnt stand for a situation like this and

churches will be a place of refuge during/after an emergency. If an

emergency happens in your area and you decide to go to a church,

stay alert. If it doesnt feel safe as youre approaching or while youre

there, leave immediately.

Mark these facilities on your map, but only the ones in areas near

where you are likely to be when a disaster happens.

4. Traffic

Youll know many of these

immediately areas from your

daily travels. What

roads/intersections get backed

up during the morning

commute? The afternoon

commute? On Fridays before a

3 day weekend? What stop

lights take 3 lights to get through?

Theres another category of choke points that will also be an issue in

disaster situations, and those would be bridges and canyons where

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an accident shuts down all traffic, places where the number of lanes

of traffic goes down, and construction areas.

Protect against intruders

House hardening

The truth is you can easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars

hardening your house with upgraded doors, windows, walls, and

roofs, but hundred thousand dollar solutions are not going to help

most of the people reading this guide. Most people who have that

kind of money to throw at urban survival would be better off

moving to a rural location full-time.

What were going to do is focus on affordable strategies and

techniques that can help protect your family and your belongings

now and inexpensive ways to beef things up quickly if you need to

be safe in a survival situation.

Its important to accept the fact that most houses in the US will

always be vulnerable if someone is determined to get in or get you

out. Many European homes are built of concrete blocks or large

stone. Its a rare house in the US that can withstand a direct impact

from a pickup. Its also a rare house that can withstand a few

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Molotov cocktails or even an ordinary wildfire, as we see almost

every summer on the news. This is why it is important to try to

bring as little trouble on your house as possible, both now and in a

disaster situation.

Lets start by looking at how burglars break into houses right now.

Apparently, 32% enter through an unlocked door or window.

According to the FBIs 13,360 reporting agencies, this happened well

over 600,000 times in the US in 2007! That was in a GOOD economy

with low unemployment.

After unlocked doors/windows, 26% of burglaries are forced by

impact, 24% by prying or jimmying, and less than 7% us a pass key

or lock pick, including the infamous lock bumping. The where is

as interesting as the how. 34% of burglars enter through the front

door, 23% through a first-floor window, and 22% through the back

door. Only 2% entered on the 2nd floor. And alarms?

Well, 41% of alarmed homes where burglaries were attempted had

their systems turned off! (Alarm battery dies quickly when the

electricity goes out, so unless you have it hooked up to a car battery

that gets recharged regularly, dont depend on it in a blackout

situation)

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Now, heres what you can do to make exterior doors more resistant

to forcible entry:

Door If you are replacing your door, go for a solid wood door,

fiberglass, or aluminum door, depending on what is recommended

for your locale and the direction the door is facing (in relation to the

sun.) Check with contractors to see if there are any businesses in

your area that stock used doors. Its possible to get great looking,

solid, slow growth wood doors that are 50+ years old for less than a

flimsy new door.

Door Swing If you are installing a new door, consider installing it

so that it swings outwards. It will negate much of the advantage that

an intruder has during a forcible entry attempt. Any attempts to

kick, ram, or push the door open will be thwarted by the entire door

frame in addition to the hinges and deadbolt.

There is a risk in doing this. If you are in blizzard country and get

deep snow against your door, you wont be able to open it to dig out.

If you are in flood country and water rises quickly, you may not be

able to open the door until the water level is the same inside and

out. And, if you ever need help from the fire department or EMS and

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cant unlock the door, they will have to do quite a bit of damage to

get inbut since youre trying to make your house difficult for

determined people to break into, thats a trade-off you may be

willing to live with.

Solution

Remove a strike plate screw and a hinge screw from each door in

your house. If they arent 3 long, then replace them with 3 screws.

Windows are the next vulnerability that were going to cover. Again,

were looking for solutions that dont make your house stand out,

will increase your security now, and increase your security in the

event of a disaster. Plywood is a great field expedient option for

protecting your windows in a hurricane, but is obviously a poor

choice during normal times.

If you use plywood during a disaster situation, it will protect your

windows, but it will do so at the cost of reduced visibility. Anyway,

having a few extra panels on hand would be very useful. Why?

Because every other option takes time to research, decide on and

install. Every other option takes significantly more money than

plywood as well.

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Self defence

Knowing how to fight off assailants is a mandatory urban survival

skill. If possible, take basic self-defense or martial arts instruction.

Some common items that are useful as self-defense urban survival

gear include:

Broomstick

Glass bottle

Walking cane

Stun gun

Pepper spray

A flashlight, radio, and spare batteries also help identify possible

safety hazards and potential assailants in unfamiliar urban terrain.

Always better to prepare and prevent

If you didnt learn this lesson yet, its time for you to start preparing

for a potential threat. And first thing to be pointed out is organize.

If you dont have a list of survival items that you need/want, youre

going to end up with a mish-mash of survival supplies with some

elementary gaps.

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You need a list based on categories and it should look like this:

1. Shelter (tarp/foil blanket/tent/sleeping bag/etc.)

2. Water (boxed/bottled water/iodine

tablets/Chlorine/boiling/filter/purifier)

3. Fire (matches/lighters/lenses/flint-mag/high-speed

tools/skills to make fire)

4. Food (cupboards/stored food/self-reliant sources)

5. Medical (Including prescriptions necessary for survival)

After these big items are taken care of, THEN take care of the

following:

- Security (dogs/weapons/skills/training/alarms)

- Comms (wireless/wired/local/extended range)

- Extra clothing

- Comfort

- Barter(cash/gold/silver/.22/cigarettes/liquor/Immodiu

m/iodine tabs)

What I encourage you to do is to create a list of all of the stuff that

you want to buy. Next, go through it and designate whether or not it

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is something that you absolutely need or something that you just

want.

Next, you will insert the time component and the list should look

like this:

Survival food for 72 hours

Survival food for 6 months

6 month supply of food we currently eat

Basic Supplies Inventory

This is an initial inventory of basic items that you should have for

Urban Survival in your house.

Fire

Food

Water (and low sugar, no caffeine drinks)

Fuel

Batteries

Trauma Supplies

Medicines (expiration dates)

Vitamins

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Prescriptions

This inventory does not have to be exact, and can look something

like this:

Fire:

Fireplace & 1/2 cord of wood

Camp stove

Propane grill

Propane single burner

12+ boxes of matches

12+ lighters

Flint/magnesium fire starter

20+ candles

Food: (non-perishable food that you wont be eating in the next 7

days)

40 cans of soup/vegetables

5 pounds of potato flakes

275 serving Costco meal bucket

2 3600 calorie bars

60 cliff bars

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Water:

60 gallon water heater

5 x 32 oz Gatorade

24 x 1 liter bottles of water

Fuel:

3 x 5 gallon Unleaded (Dated)

2 x 20 lb propane

1 gal white gas (camp fuel)

400g isobutane (camp stove)

Batteries:

20 AA

10 AAA

2 9V

0 C

0 D

3 Lithium flashlight batteries

1 extra watch battery

Trauma:

Band aids from mid 1990s

Costco first aid kit

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Medications:

Advil: 300+

Tylenol: 225

Aloe: 16 oz

Imodium: 16 oz

Vitamins:

60 days

Prescriptions:

36 contacts & 1 pr glasses

You can also include ammo and other survival supplies that you

have on hand.

Psychology aspects

If you thought that having all the food,

water, guns and skills to overcome a

potential threat is enough, you couldnt

be more wrong.

The mind is truly the cornerstone of survival

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The first thing you need to do is accept the fact that fear is OK. Only

delusional people will operate without fear in a survival situation.

Its much more healthy to identify fear, accept it, and use it as a high-

performance fuel. The more you can learn to identify and love the

feel of fear-induced adrenaline coursing through your veins and use

it to improve your performance, the more you will become the

master of it.

The best way to do this is to put yourself in controlled situations

where you get adrenaline rushes. Well, thats right. Not everyone

can stack up and raid a house, serve high-risk warrants, or set up

and execute an ambush, but there are other activities that you can

do to help you get used to adrenaline. Sparring, shooting

competitions, rock climbing, rappelling, high-consequence

negotiating, and public speaking are just a few.

The next thing you need to keep in mind is that in a survival

situation, you will lose things. It could be your comfortable life,

possessions, friends, or a family member. You dont want to make

your life about focusing on what you lost, but your mind will need to

work through various emotions as you are moving forward with

your life. Move forward and dont dwell on the past.

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Set goals. It could be as simple as making sure everyone gets 7 hours

of sleep and that you talk with 3 of your neighbors every day for the

next week. In a survival situation, you might have a map of the area

and set a goal to explore 10 new blocks every day until you have

covered every street within a mile of your house.

If you have 100 gallons of water, 5 people and 2 dogs and youre

figuring 2 gallons per person per day and gallon per dog, you will

want to have a goal to secure additional water for your group within

a week if you dont have a way to recycle it. These goals will give

your mind something to focus on. Your mind will focus on

something. And it better be productive. Being selfish is not an

option.

Allow yourself to only think about things that you have control over.

Worrying about what the weather is going to do will not help you.

Creating a hasty plan for what you will do if various weather events

happen will help you. Worrying about which of your rights the

government might eviscerate next will not help you. Getting active

politically by volunteering, helping a candidate or elected official

with research or by donating can help. As worries or concerns enter

your mind, evaluate whether or not you can do anything about them.

If not, think about something else. If it is something that you can do

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something about, come up with a hasty plan, write it down if

necessary, and expand on it later if it makes sense to do so.

And remember: Have something bigger than yourself to live for.

Its the will to survive that might save you.

Joke, smile, laugh and play games when possible. It will refreshes

your soul and in a survival situation, youre likely to need lots of

refreshing. Besides light hearted laughter, know that youll probably

find yourself laughing at inappropriate things. Medical

professionals, firemen, and soldiers often laugh at disgusting, sad,

and gut wrenching situations.

There are many stressful situations where the line between crying

and laughing is blurred. Someone watching from the outside might

think that you are being irreverent, but in reality it is a simple

coping mechanism that our brain uses to give us an emotional

outlet. Just accept it, go with it, and know that most people will not

understand the humor, but hopefully the people that youre with

will.

People under stress have a potential to panic if they are not well-

trained and not prepared psychologically to face whatever the

circumstances may be. While we often cannot control the survival

circumstances in which we find ourselves, it is within our ability to

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control our response to those circumstances. Learning stress

management techniques can enhance significantly your capability to

remain calm and focused as you work to keep yourself and others

alive. A few good techniques to develop include relaxation skills,

time management skills, assertiveness skills, and cognitive

restructuring skills (the ability to control how you view a situation).

Remember, "the will to survive" can also be considered to be "the

refusal to give up."

Never waste time focusing on problems when you can use that time

to come up with solutions. It is subtle, but the difference in results is

dramatic. Focusing on problems is degenerative in nature. It eats

away at your mind, your sleep, and your relationships. When you

identify a problem, immediately focusing on solutions trains your

mind to look forward, to anticipate a better future, and to spend

time on thoughts that can actually help you.

I cant stress enough on how important psychology is to survival and

how vital your ability to positively influence yourself and those

around you will be. In a survival situation, you may need firearms

skills, martial arts skills or negotiating skills, but you will most

certainly need the ability to calm your mind and calm the minds of

those around you.

Documents

Urban Survival Guide